The buying and selling of goods and services (collectively referred to as “products”) has resulted in a vast array of costing schemes, which are used to select the price at which such products are sold. One of the most common costing schemes which consumers encounter everyday is known as fixed pricing. According to this costing scheme, sellers set a fixed price for their products based on a past demand for the product and/or anticipated future demand. Buyers desiring to purchase products from the seller are each required to pay the same fixed price regardless of the number of products purchased. If a seller finds that the demand for a given product is greater or less than expected, the seller may later adjust the fixed price of the product to account for such findings. Although the fixed pricing provides a simple way for a seller to conduct business with multiple buyers, one drawback of this costing scheme is that it fails to reward buyers willing to purchase greater quantities of products. Accordingly, the discount quantity pricing scheme evolved.
The discount quantity pricing approach to costing involves pricing a product at different levels depending on the quantity of products a customer is willing to purchase. The more products a customer is willing to purchase, the lower the price. Sellers have incentive to lower price for large quantity buyers since the fixed costs associated with producing the product is spread over more items. Thus, sellers are able to make equal or greater profits despite the lowered price of the product. While volume pricing offers a benefit to larger buyers who are able to purchase large quantities of goods at one time, smaller buyers are often unable to obtain the lowered prices and therefore are more likely to “shop around” for the best available deal. This, in turn, hurts both the buyer and seller. For instance, the smaller buyer is burdened with needing to search for alternative deals and still often ends up paying a higher price than larger buyers. The sellers, on the other hand, are faced with lost business since they are unable to reduce their price for the smaller buyers and still make sufficient profit.
Another common costing scheme for pricing a product is an auction. In an auction, a seller sets an initial price for an item and then multiple buyers are given an opportunity to bid against each other for the product. The buyer having placed the highest bid for the product at the end of the auction purchases the product at the final price bid. In order to provide a larger forum for buyers and sellers, a recent trend has been to auction goods electronically over the Internet. For example, one company known to operate an auction site over the Internet is eBay, Inc. Although auctions provide advantages when selling unique products for which customers are willing to competitively bid, the auction forum is not well suited for sellers desiring to sell large quantities of goods to multiple buyers given the inherent inefficiencies involved with selling one product at a time in a bidding environment.
Yet another costing scheme, which has been advanced in recent years, is buyer-driven bidding. According to this costing scheme, a single buyer desiring to obtain a product communicates a price at which the buyer is willing to purchase the product to multiple sellers. Each of the sellers is provided an opportunity to review the buyer's price. A sale is complete when one of the sellers agrees to sell the product to the buyer at the price suggested by the buyer. A buyer-driven bidding scheme is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,207 assigned to Walker Asset Management Limited Partnership of Stamford, Conn. While the buyer-driven bidding scheme provides advantages for certain types of transactions when, for example, sellers may be willing to sell products at lower than normal prices, the uncertainties involved with whether a buyer's offer will be accepted is often problematic for high volume commercial transactions in which the reliability that a transaction will be complete is of paramount importance.
While the costing schemes described above have various advantages and disadvantages in different situations, a commonality among all of the costing schemes is that each buyer operates independently with one or more sellers to set a purchase price of a product. For example, in the fixed pricing scheme and discount quantity purchasing scheme, buyers individually determine whether the sellers preset price schedule is acceptable regardless of whether other buyers have decided to purchase the product or not. In an auction, not only do buyers operate independent of other buyers but, in fact, each buyer's decision to place a bid has a negative effect on all other buyers desiring to purchase the same good since the price of the good increases. Similarly, in a buyer-driven bidding scheme, each buyer is completely unaware of the amount other buyers are bidding for a given product.
The independent operations of the buyers stems from a combination of the fact that: 1) the costing schemes discussed above provide little incentive for buyers to work together and 2) there are large inconveniences for buyers to facilitate communication about their buying activities to other buyers. Unfortunately, such independent operation by buyers can result in missed opportunities for both the buyer and seller. For example, in instances where two independent buyers are unable to afford a product, neither buyer informs the seller of their respective desire to purchase the product. Accordingly, sales of the product to these buyers do not take place. Due to the independent operations by each of the buyers, such information is never communicated thereby resulting in missed opportunities for both the buyers and seller alike.